Network Traffic Cop

Why You Should Clone Your Mac Now

Friday, August 5, 2011

Let your paranoia get the best of you. Sooner or later, when you least expect it, your Mac’s hard disk drive will fail. What’s your backup plan? Time Machine? You need more than that if you want to get your Mac up and running quickly. If your photos, music, documents, and movies are valuable to you, then you need a better way to back up your Mac.

Send In The Clones

Clone your Mac’s hard disk drive. What that means is that you get another external disk drive, plug it into your Mac, erase it, then clone your Mac’s disk drive to the external.

Bit for bit, byte for byte, app for app, and file for file. The external hard disk drive becomes a clone of your Mac. That means if anything goes wrong with the original disk, you have not only a backup, but a backup that can be connected to any comparable Mac, and you can start up, in business, ready to go within minutes.

Cloning a Mac’s disk is easy. Start with an external disk drive, plug it into your Mac, use Disk Utility to format it or partition to your needs. Then, if you’re on a budget, download donationware Carbon Copy Cloner, or, if you prefer the best, SuperDuper!

Each app is easy to use and will clone your Mac’s disk drive to another disk. In an hour or so you’ll have a clone of your Mac.

Carbon Copy

Carbon Copy Cloner brings four basic functions that you must have in any good backup situation. First, the Clone. It’s a duplicate of the Mac’s disk drive. Second, Synchronize. CCC makes it easy to keep specific files and folders in sync between Macs or between disk drives.

Third, Backup. It’s one thing to clone everything, but something else to simply backup files from one Mac to another. CCC does that with a click. Fourth, Schedule. Let CCC do the work. If your Mac and disks are plugged in and running, CCC does the clone, backup, or sync.

SuperDuper!

SuperDuper! does the same thing as CCC but differently. Some aspects, particularly the cloning and scheduling, are actually easier to set up and use. Syncing and backups take more set up time.

The benefit of a cloned Mac is obvious the first time you have a problem. The cloned Mac hard disk drive can be moved to another Mac and you’re ready to go, right where you were from the last backup, sync, or clone.

In my experience through the years, there’s not much difference between clones from CCC or SuperDuper!, though I prefer the latter, yet both have saved me hours of rebuilding a Mac after a dead or dying disk drive infiltrated my Mac life.

One aspect that both CCC and SuperDuper! have in common is incremental backups. That means, during a clone or backup process, only the files which have changed on the originating disk or Mac are changed on the target backup. The first clone may take an hour. The second clone or backup may take minutes.

How do you decide whether or not to have a backup system in place? Simply ask yourself this, “What would I do if I turned on my Mac and it was dead?” All the files were gone. What would you do? The answer is to turn to your backup.

Bank On It

Manage your money and control finances better than Quicken with Banktivity 7. Start with templates and setup event based budgets, track bills, check investments and monitor assets, record all your transactions, view reports, and sync between Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Reader Interactions

« Nextly

Previously »

Primary Sidebar

Power Mac Finder

Give your Mac's Finder new super powers, manage files and folders faster, control it all with Path Finder. Get full keyboard navigation in a Finder-like app with dual pane view, folder sync, and a long list of tools.